In 2000, the total GDP of Earth was $36 trillion. At the start of 2007, it was $70 trillion. Today that growth has gone suddenly and sharply into decline.

John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless bankers, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders, to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do.

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An immensely readable account of the credit crunch by an informed observer rather than a participant with an axe to grind.

Nobody could avoid being totally bemused by the shenanigins of the financial institutions who brought about the credit crunch in 2008 - 2009. I certainly could not nor could I grasp the scale - what does $ trillions mean? How do sane bankers provide mortgages to poor people without any security of assets or income and convert them into triple AAA rated loans? And how can these loans be multiplied up to such an extent that they threaten the global financial markets? What are derivatives and why do they now dominate the financial markets? Should Lehman's bank and the US mortgage companies - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - have been allowed to fail? Were we right to bail out Northern Rock and rescue our banks whose key expertise is meant to be assessing risk? And why were the credit rating agencies not blowing the whistle on the incompetent bankers - surely that is what they are paid to do?

Whoops provides a comprehensible and entertaining account of what went wrong. He places the credit crunch in historical context - the collapse of communism in 1989 and the liberalisation of the financial markets especially the Big Bang in the UK and the repeal of regulation in the US. He explains in layman's terms the explosion of derivatives like credit default swaps (CDS's) and collateralised debt obligations (CDO's) and how they rapidly came to dominate the markets. The lack of understanding of their risk by those who ran many banks is absolutely staggering. There were exceptions, notably JP Morgan, who had pretty much invented the CDS and CDO industry and could see how profitable were these instruments, but to whom the risks were apparent and so they avoided them.

Lanchester writes a very human story. He discusses psychology research which proves that humans, even expert humans, have a particular propensity to errors in relation to risk. In the context of a widespread belief in the power of the free market to correct itself with its arch exponent Alan Greenspan, long time head of the US Federal Reserve, and with the growth of the mathematical modellers basing their work on historical data which did not include major downturns, risk becomes underrated.

The absence of any regulation by the financial services authorities is, in hindsight, fatal. The entire climate of opinion throughout the world was in favour of laissez faire, deregulation and financial innovation. Even where regulation was supposed to exist, the US's SEC and the UK's FSA were negligent. The SEC was warned about Madoff's long running Ponsi scheme and journalists did foresee the risks building up in the global financial system but "expert overconfidence" ignored them.

John Lanchester's conclusions are very depressing. Whilst not relating to $ trillions, I can get my head around the projected US deficit being bigger than the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the 1980's Loan crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and the moon landing all added together. In the UK relatively we are just as badly off. It is going to take a very long time to pay off this debt off. And John Lanchester is sceptical of the action that will be taken to regulate to prevent future crises.

This book will make any thinking person livid with rage and very, very worried. By pure luck I read it back-to-back with Fools Gold by Gillian Tett, an equally excellent though very different account of the same events. (In Whoops! John Lanchester pays tribute to Ms Tett as one of the few journalists to recognise and warn against the risks which the banks were running before it all blew up). Whoops! is aimed squarely at the intelligent reader who isn't an expert in high finance and the author succeeds brilliantly at explaining in everyday terms concepts which are, at best, abstruse. Given its subject matter, the book is quite astonishingly entertaining but the author's conclusion is both bleak and frightening - a real, effective fix for the banks is not going to happen until after the NEXT crisis and that crisis, whenever it arrives, will be far worse than 2008 because "it will be close to impossible for the politicians to help the banks stay solvent". The most worrying thing about this conclusion is that it is contained in an epilogue added in August 2010. Whoops! is a superb book which should be compulsory reading for every banker (or "bankster" as Mr Lanchester prefers to style them), politician and voter. Highly recommended but ultimately a very uncomfortable read.

I am deeply grateful to John Lanchester for this lucid, funny and passionate account of the recent Great Crash. Before I read it, I felt impotent and angry; now I feel impotent, angry but informed - and, considering I surrender, numbed and uncomprehending, after two paragraphs of your average money page in the newspaper, I can say that financially informed is an unusual, but satisfying place for me to be. Others have criticised the informal style. It held me spellbound - true, the tone is conversational, the pace as racy as a thriller, but the book is none the worse for that. JL is also articulate, knowledgeable and totally unpatronising. With friendly charm, he kindly assumes that you are both intelligent and curious, and unravels the complexities of the credit crunch with a deftness and lightness of touch that nevertheless confronts head on the profoundly serious situation, moral as well as financial, in which we now find ourselves.

Lanchester attempts, and for the most part succeeds, in describing the 2008/2009 "financial crisis" in plain English. With a prophetic eye, he addresses the structural changes in society, especially in the UK and US, that fostered it and offers salutary prescriptions. A lively read too, with well chosen quotes, not too short, not too long.

It's a cliche to say that every body should read a book, but one of the messages from this brilliant book is that most of us blithely went about our business, perhaps enjoying the boom times, wholly unaware of what was happening in financial markets. Yet what was happening was crazy, fascinating, and driven by geniuses scarily out of touch with reality. It is, as John Lanchester argues, one of the greatest stories ever told--and postmodern to boot. We should have been watching and understanding--because now we will feel the pain of our collective failure.

I spent a year at the Stanford Business School, studied finance, and read several issues a year of the Economist, but I had no idea what was happening. Nor despite reading Galbraith's "The Crash" and Vince Cable's book did I understand it until I read John's book. It is a tremendous achievement and illustrates the value of a highly intelligent mind untainted by technical immersion in a subject studying a phenomenon.

John brings all his wit and novelist skills to the book so that it is highly readable, explains the near incomprehensible, and makes you laugh. It's one of life's greatest pleasures to be fascinated, amused, and educated all at the same time.